NORMATIVA LEGAL APLICABLE A CENTRALES EÓLICAS Y LAS ESPECIFICACIONES PARA CONTROL DE POTENCIA LAS ESPECIFICACIONES PARA CONTROL DE POTENCIA

Farmer Giles of Ham represents Tolkien’s only medieval

parody that both imitates a medieval form or genre and also burlesques medieval literary conventions, ideas, and characters drawn from fourteenth-century works, espe- cially Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s Can-

terbury Tales. These two masterpieces of English literature

are usually seen by Tolkien scholars—when they are con- sidered at all—as having influenced The Lord of the Rings rather than Farmer Giles of Ham.15 _{Published in 1949, this}

medieval parody marks Tolkien’s completion of The Lord

of the Rings and, as “a vacation from the ‘things higher . . .

deeper . . . darker’ which these epics [The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion] treat,”16 _{spoofs the epic through its}

mock-heroic style and the academic scholarship of its fussy, editorial preface by the pseudo-historian and linguist

who “discovered” the original manuscript. In addition,

Farmer Giles mocks Tolkien’s own creative works and his

scholarship, themselves indebted to the medieval literature from which so many of his ideas of heroism, chivalry, and kingship derive. It is no accident that Tolkien spent so many years of his life polishing texts and glossary for his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925), later publishing a critical essay, “Ofermod,” to accompany his verse drama “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” (1953), and also his translation of two of the poems by the Gawain poet along with the Middle English poem

Sir Orfeo (1975).17 _{Tolkien also published two philologi-}

cal essays directly or indirectly involving language in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, one short note (“The Devil’s Coach-Horses,” 1925) referring to the kind of horse the Shipman was riding on the pilgrimage, as described in his portrait in the General Prologue, and one long study (“Chaucer as Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale,” 1934) on the class and cultural difference of the two northern clerks in

The Reeve’s Tale and how their dialect reveals their place

of origin to their disadvantage.18

The mock-heroic style reduces the grandiose and long Latin title of the work to the simple translation Farmer

Giles of Ham: the serious is made trivial. So the hero and

his chief adversary become a rude farmer and his domes- ticated pet. Giles never wants to slay monsters; his cow- ardly dog barks until he is roused from bed one night, sensing an intruder. This giant intruder turns out to be deaf and nearsighted, accidentally flattening Galatea the cow as he enters Giles’s farm and mistaking his assailant’s blunderbuss charge for a swarm of horseflies. The second monster, the dragon Chrysophylax, after defeat in battle becomes a large pet who, like Garm the dog earlier, pro- tects Giles’s farm and his acquired treasure. Tolkien’s medievalized art undergoes a humorous reduction very

similar to the squashing of Galatea the cow, named after Pygmalion’s ivory statue brought to life as a woman. Sug- gesting the life-giving power inherent in the artist’s func- tion, the myth under mock-heroic treatment shows how life (the cow) is snuffed out by the artist (a deaf and short- sighted giant) and how myth (classical or medieval, but in this case from Ovid) is flattened into burlesque (mod- ern, from Tolkien). Throughout Farmer Giles it is not the mythology of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that Tolkien delights in flattening so much as his own mythology portrayed in

The Hobbit and “The New Hobbit.” These works were

influenced by various medieval sources, including Beowulf, as understood in Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, later dis- cussed in the “Ofermod” section of “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son.”

That is, as we have seen in chapter 2, Tolkien fiction- alizes ideas of monstrosity in The Hobbit also delineated in the Beowulf article. In The Hobbit the two primary monsters are Gollum in the first part and the dragon Smaug in the second; the first signifying the more physi- cal sins of gluttony and sloth; the second signifying the more intellectual sins of wrath, envy, avarice, and pride. But these monsters merely externalize the evil present in Bilbo and other characters. So avarice and pride also trouble Thorin the Dwarf-king and the Master of Dale, expressed through their desire for kingship or mastery over others. Finally, the critic-as-monster is represented by the supercilious adult narrator of the children’s story.

Tolkien parodies this same schema in Farmer Giles. One important clue to his intentions exists in the use of the phrase from the “Beowulf ” essay, “until the dragon came,” to mark the change in Giles’s luck caused by the first appearance of the dragon (Farmer Giles, p. 22). Origi- nally ending his Beowulf article, the phrase dramatized the

universal threat of chaos and death to humankind. Fur- ther, the giant who stumbles onto Giles’s farm mimics the monster Grendel, who deliberately attacked Heorot out of envy; the dragon Chrysophylax in the later parts who first attacks Ham and then is attacked within his lair by Giles plays the part of Beowulf ’s dragon who first ravages the Geat countryside because of the theft of a cup and then is approached in his barrow by Beowulf and Wiglaf. Farmer Giles also invites comparison with The Hobbit: its first monster, Gollum, exhibits inordinate gluttony and sloth (lower, physical sins) and its second monster, Smaug, ex- hibits avarice and pride (higher, more spiritual sins) in the same way that the giant is physically limited because deaf and nearsighted and the dragon is spiritually limited be- cause greedy and conscienceless. In addition, the metaphor of kingship in Farmer Giles reiterates that of The Hobbit: Augustus Bonifacius is depicted as avaricious and proud as are both King Beowulf and Thorin the Dwarf-king. Fi- nally, the pompous editor-translator who belittles the vul- garity of the manuscript resembles the narrator of The

Hobbit who throughout belittles the childishness and stu-

pidity of the halflings and Dwarves.

But this fictionalization of the Beowulf article differs from the original article and The Hobbit because it also fictionalizes the distinction between heroism and chivalry evidenced four years later in “Ofermod.” In the latter es- say Tolkien perceives that the excessive pride of king or knight stems from the chivalric code of the aristocracy as criticized in both Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green

Knight. In “Ofermod” he uses these as exemplary works;

in Farmer Giles he also introduces new material drawn from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, especially the fabliaux of the Miller and the Reeve, to mock the heroic form of the romance. Just as the Miller tells a scatological tale to hu- miliate Chaucer’s Knight, who has just narrated a long

romance of lofty, appropriately aristocratic idealism and chivalry, so Tolkien’s hero in this fabliau-romance, a crude farmer, will humiliate several knights and even a king. Their chivalry cannot be viewed as ideal because it distracts the aristocracy from protecting the lower classes for which it is responsible. Giles becomes a knight and then a king of his own realm because he does not fall prey to the ex- cessive pride inherent in the chivalric code of the upper class. However, he also apparently lacks the manners and courtesy of the knight as defined in Sir Gawain and the

Green Knight.

The testing of Sir Gawain’s cortaysye occurs on the three days he is visited by his lord’s lady, even while his allegiance to his host-lord and to God (through loyalty and through adherence to Christian virtue) is simultaneously tested. That he fails, even mildly, despite exemplary behav- ior, becomes clear by the end of the poem when he scan- dalously accepts the lady’s magic girdle, deceives his host by refusing to give him this “winning” as he had prom- ised, succumbs to cowardice in combat by flinching before the Green Knight’s axe, and then blames his failure rather discourteously and rudely upon a woman. Tolkien terms the work, in “Ofermod,” “in plain intention a criticism or valuation of a whole code of sentiment and conduct, in which heroic courage is only a part, with different loyal- ties to serve” (“Ofermod,” p. 23). For Sir Gawain does risk death in order to support his lord and uncle, King Arthur, literally and courageously by accepting the challenge of the Green Knight and more figuratively and spiritually by showing his loyalty and love for him. He is a heroic figure here because he is a subordinate.

Tolkien deliberately invokes Sir Gawain and the Green

Knight in Farmer Giles through humorous parallels. Spe-

cifically, the entry of the “rude and uncultured” giant (Farmer Giles, p. 10) into Giles’s territory at the beginning

mimics the boisterous arrival of the Green Knight—atop his green horse—in the midst of the king’s Christmas feast. Unknowingly this giant does issue a “challenge” to the incipient knight Giles similar to that of the Green Knight—for thereafter Giles finds himself embroiled in knightly exploits fighting the dragon with the subsequent reward of the king’s sword “Tailbiter” for his valor. Later in the work there is actually a Christmas feast during which the dragon, lured to the territory by the giant’s idea that knights have become mythical, is ravaging the countryside as a rude “guest.” And the king’s knights, who in their cowardice resemble Arthur’s, delay in fighting this dragon because of a tournament planned for Saint John’s Day: “It was obviously unreasonable to spoil the chances of the Midland Knights by sending their best men off on a dragon-hunt before the tournament was over” (Farmer

Giles, p. 28). Like Sir Gawain, Giles must defend his king’s

honor.

More generally the theme of cultural degeneration caused by an effete and selfish chivalry appears similar in the two works. When manners and etiquette supersede heroic courage and loyalty to lord, then a culture has be- come corrupt in the worst and most effetely chivalric sense. Augustus’s knights have become literalists in their interpretation of the chivalric code: they are more inter- ested in how they appear on the outside than in what they really are on the inside. When the king acknowledges Giles’s retention of “the ancient courage of our race,” his knights meanwhile talk “among themselves about the new fashion in hats” (Farmer Giles, p. 50). Forced to accom- pany Giles on his quest of the dragon’s lair, they do not see dragon-marks on the trail because they “were discuss- ing points of precedence and etiquette, and their attention was distracted” (Farmer Giles, pp. 57–58). Of course, they turn tail and run when confronted by the monster.

The king too seems to regard manners as more im- portant than morals, just as he regards money as a greater good than love and loyalty. When Giles does not come to the king after being summoned upon his return with the treasure from the dragon’s lair, the king scolds, “Your manners are unfit for our presence, . . . but that does not excuse you from coming when sent for” (Farmer Giles, p. 70). Yet the king himself reacts very coarsely when he first learns of Giles’s recalcitrance: his “rage exploded,” he “bel- lowed,” he ordered Giles to be thrown into prison, and later he even demands the return of his gift of Tailbiter (Farmer Giles, pp. 69–70). Indeed, his greatest concern throughout the tale lies with the treasure rather than with Giles’s bravery in battle: his “knight” becomes a means to a financial end. The dragon’s promise to return with his treasure after his defeat by Giles “deeply moved” the king—“for various reasons, not the least being financial” (Farmer Giles, p. 49). And when the beast does not reap- pear on the designated day, Augustus rages because “the King wanted money” (Farmer Giles, p. 53). Caring only about his coffers, Augustus fails to treat Giles as a real person; such a failure results in his kingdom’s downfall.

The well-mannered and fashionable knights and king in the tale contrast with the “rude and uncultured” giant and the merchantlike dragon who bargains with Giles over the price of his defeat—and with the coarse Farmer Giles. But the apparent heroes are revealed as adversaries, and the “monsters” become heroes (or the hero’s pets) by the tale’s end. Tolkien condemns the aristocracy throughout for its perpetration of the dehumanizing chivalric code and ap- plauds the commons’ heroic courage and love, which even- tually triumphs over the former. Worthiness springs from good deeds and not fine clothes or ancestry or manners.

Giles, despite his uncouth behavior, does manifest heroism and courage. The dragon immediately recognizes

his true nature during their first meeting: “You have con- cealed your honorable name and pretended that our meet- ing was by chance; yet you are plainly a knight of high lineage. It used, sir, to be the custom of knights to issue a challenge in such cases, after a proper exchange of titles and credentials” (Farmer Giles, p. 43). He is actually what a knight should be, despite his lack of a title. Tolkien agrees with the dragon by providing an appropriate feast day for the confrontation between hero and monster, the Feast of the Epiphany on Twelfth Night, or 6 January, when Christ was revealed to the Magi. The “epiphany” or revelation here introduces the true knight to the dragon—and to the reader.

As the true hero of the work is a churl, so its real form or genre emerges as the low-styled, humorous fabliau that Chaucer’s Miller uses to quyten (or “repay”) the high- flown rhetoric of the Knight in his philosophical romance. The style of the former involves a “bourgeois realism” in contrast to the “aristocratic idealism” of the latter.19 _{So, in}

Farmer Giles, the villagers speak a rough and idiomatic

language very unlike that of the genteel and elegant aris- tocrats. And indeed, these rural folk who establish them- selves as Draconarii in league with Giles derive their identities in part from Chaucer’s low-life and poor Can- terbury pilgrims. Not only is there Farmer Giles, reminis- cent of the Miller, there is also a reeve who is as antagonistic toward Giles as Oswald is toward the Miller in the Canterbury Tales. The parson seems to combine Chaucer’s gentle and good Parson with his learned Clerk, for he acts also as a grammarian in Farmer Giles and re- veals the original name of Tailbiter as Caudimordax. Fi- nally, there exists a blacksmith who favors Giles’s cause by providing him with steel chain-mail and helmet, possibly a pale shadow of the blacksmith in the Miller’s Tale who gives Absolon the hot coulter with which to “battle” with

his adversary, hende Nicholas, as the latter plays his crude joke for the last time.

Tolkien’s view of the subordinate as more admirable than the chief or king who employs his men as instruments to boost his name in battle is expressed in this fabliau- romance through a class struggle between the commons and the aristocracy: the comitatus ethic dividing Germanic society into subordinate warriors and king is metamor- phosed into that division of late medieval society into two if not three estates (usually commons, clergy, and aristoc- racy). The triumph of commons over aristocracy, however, communicates a singularly unmedieval and very modern idea: it suggests a nineteenth- or twentieth-century revo- lutionary outlook, except that the leader of the common- ers actually becomes king and a new aristocracy is created, presumably with its own new commons (note that when Giles becomes king the blacksmith engages in undertak- ing; the miller, given the royal monopoly on milling, serves the crown; and the parson advances to bishop). The old order is revitalized, but perhaps there is no real change except in the introduction of a bourgeoisie, yet another class. A similar consequence of the failure of the aristo- cratic code occurs after the death of Beorhtnoth in a work that deals with an even earlier medieval period—“The Homecoming,” describing the events of 991.

IV. “THE HOMECOMINGOF BEORHTNOTH